David raised his eyebrows in question.
“Ah, the Vaults that lay under St Pendragon’s. I’m not sure how familiar you are with your church history, but--”
“Sure,” David chimed in. “Three-tiered vaults, all with different levels of security charms to protect the secrets within, kinda thing?”
The vicar chuckled. “Something like that, yes. The Vaults house a complete collection of the history of Witchcraft and Wizardry across both the Coven Isles and the Mainland. They come to us by way of the Albigensian Crusades in France.The first-ever Inquisition was putting Cathars and more than a few witches to the pyre, which, in turn, caused a mass migration to our fair shores. That was how a good many items that remain in our collection to this day formed the basis of what resides in the Vaults.” David nodded at Thaddeus to continue.
“The rooms hold artifacts, tomes and treasures of yore, the lower the vault is, the more secure the charms and wards. Level 3 is the bottom-most chamber, and, so, of course contains the real treasures. Some of the rarest and oldest documents on sorcery ever recorded.”
“And, what was Morag’s interest in the Vaults?” I enquired from my corner.
Peacefield turned to face me. “Well, this is what’s strange. Ms. Devlin wasn’t enquiring about what the Vaults contained, as most history-curious people would. No, she was more interested in the wards that protected them.” The vicar scratched his chin with a chubby finger. “I caught her in the topmost Vault, just last week. It appeared she was searching for the mechanism that would allow her access to the chambers below. She was practically babbling when I escorted her out of the room. ‘How safe are the chambers? Could they withstand top-level magic? Had anyone managed to break into them before?’ That kind of talk. I admit, it was quite puzzling behaviour.” David and I glanced at one another (again.) Thaddeus caught the exchange and he bobbed his head between the two of us.
“I just assumed it was because she was under tremendous strain. So, do you think Morag might have been interested in the Vaults as some kind of hiding place for something?”
Well, we did now …
By the time we finished questioning St Pendragon’s frontman, it was nearly eleven PM. I was weary from the tidal wave of crazy events, and I could tell David was too. He walked me home, nonetheless. It was another pensive affair with neither of us talking, both lost in our own thoughts. I was still wearing my alleged ‘man-catching’ sweater, (Divinity Prettykins’ words, not mine,) and I hadn’t yet ‘caught’ my man. Alas. I chanced a sideward glance at my friend. David was holding his stomach. I looked up to his face. A little shiny and definitely pale.
“Everything okay, David?” I asked, catching hold of his arm.
He gave me a weak smile and shook his head. “I stuffed a chili-dog into my face before leaving the Mabon Fair,” my friend grimaced at me in mock discomfort. “No, seriously, it’s nothing, Hat. Just flaming indigestion.”
I squeezed his arm. “I can get you some bicarbonate of soda to help with that,” I offered efficiently, picking up my pace a little.
“No need, really, I have these,” David produced a packet of antacids. “Spinefield gave them to me,” he confided. We had reached the doorstep of The Angel. I could see Millie and the cats, all sitting in a loose circle round the counter. They were in the middle of some lively discussion by the looks of it. I turned back to David.
“You sure?”
“You bet, Saint Apothecarius,” my best friend teased. We embraced. It felt awkward, and as if David was keeping the length of his body just out of reach. The millimetre gap he created between us felt as vast as that giant canyon on the Mainland. I felt the harsh squeeze on my heart almost immediately. What have I done wrong?
I was about to open the door to The Angel Apothecary, my place of work, my business, my home, when David stopped me.
“Hat, what was that spell you pulled out tonight?” My friend’s eyes searched mine.
“I - I- I’m not sure, David. I think it was the levitation charm, but I can’t be sure. It’s all a bit foggy, for some reason.” I shrugged my shoulders. Strangely, I was on the brink of tears just thinking about it. David rubbed my head. The way he would rub one of the cat’s heads. Or his kid sister’s head. If he had a sister, that is. Bast! I’m the sister, aren’t I? My heart shriveled a little more.
“Speak tomorrow? Maude should know more about those spider-vein networks on Morag’s temples, hopefully.”
“Of course.” I offered a smile that I didn’t feel, and turned to open the door of The Angel.
I gave one last glance over my shoulder at him as he walked away. My whole being told me the truth. Something was really bothering the love of my life, and I had no idea what it was.
The tinkle of the shop announced my interruption to the conversation was taking place before I barged into the room. I just had time to hear the last few words coming from Eclipse:
“...still say it was the levitation charm. I mean, Hattie’s a reasonably skilled witch, but powerful enough to pull off a Chimera Charm?” He flicked his tail in disgust. The shop bell tinkled my entrance, and nine heads swiveled toward me.
Millie was seated in the easy chair she’d pulled in from the back kitchen. She’d situated it next to the fire where Carbon was sprawled. Fraidy and Jet were draped across Millie’s shoulders; the latter’s two front paws resting easily on Millie’s cerulean blue hair, while the former used my assistant’s hair as a concealing veil. Onyx and Gloom occupied the two arms of the chair, facing one another. Eclipse sat on the counter looking down at all of them, while Shade and Midnight played a game of paper toss across the shop’s polished floor.
My assistant sighed when she saw me. She ‘de-catted’ herself and walked the short distance so she could hug me. It felt good, and I returned the gesture in earnest.
“Oh, Hattie,” Millie said. “Here we all were, determined to have some well-earned fun and instead something like THIS happens.” Millie walked backward and flopped with perfect timing into her comfy seat once more, the cat’s taking up their previous positions without missing a beat.
“I’m okay, honey,” I told her, resting my back against the counter next to Eclipse. My mind-wiping cat nudged me and purred his contentment at having me so close.
“Better than poor Morag.” Shade quipped, scoring a paper-ball goal past Midnight’s unsuspecting paws.
“Who’d have ever thought you’d be saying ‘poor’ and ‘Morag’ in the same sentence?” Gloom grumbled from her perch on the chair arm.
“Gloom,” Onyx said with a tone of reproach.
“Speaking of people saying things,” I said, giving my audience a careful look. “What were you all talking about just before I came in the door?”
Eight sets of yellow eyes turned to me. Millie’s too. A pregnant pause.
Millie let out an exasperated sigh. “Oh, if you won’t tell her, I will. We were talking about that spell you used to try and catch Morag.”
“I swear on Granny Chimera’s grave,” I said. “I still have no idea what I—“
“It was the Chimera Charm, Seraphim,” Onyx said, his tone appropriately grave.
You could have heard a pin drop. And then Shade piped up.
“Preach, brother,”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Onyx,” I said rubbing my eyes. I was tired, and I didn’t want to think about this right now. I didn’t even know myself what happened at the Mabon Fair, so I wasn’t about to have a public debate about it.
“What-whatever it was,” Fraidy said, from under one-half of Millie’s blue hair. “There’s no way it was just…regular run-of-the-mill magic. I’ve seen enough of it to know, you know?”
“You mean you’ve run away from enough of it to know,” Gloom quipped. “Probably why you can’t tell the difference between the Chimera Charm and a levitation charm.”
I shook my head. “Levitation charms take concentration and focus. If I were that spacey when trying to fly my
broom, it’d never even get off the ground.”
“Still, lest we forget—“ Eclipse began from his perch on the counter.
“Ironic choice of words from Mr. Memory Wipe,” Gloom sniped.
Eclipse shot his sister a hard stare and continued. “You’ve been working a fair bit of magic these last few months, boss. A lot more than in previous years. Maybe the levitation charm came to you faster than you realized it could?” He asked hopefully, trying to win his argument.
A chorus of conflicting points-of-view erupted between my kitties. I noticed one furball who said nothing.
“You don’t have an opinion, Jetstream?” I asked my agoraphobic cat
“Hey, I wasn’t there,” Jet answered in his rapid patter. “So I can’t make a judgment call one way or another here, boss.”
“That’s what you get for using up too much of your catnip,” Carbon said, stretching to full length before his beloved heat source. “Hells, I’m a homebody, and even I managed to get out of the house.”
“Hey, I have a chronic condition!”
“Yeah, it’s called ‘being you,'” Gloom muttered.
“Look,” I said, wanting to head off another verbal jousting. “Before we drag this debate out any further, it might help the more ignorant among us to know what the Chimera Charm actually is.”
“That would be your cue, Professor,” Gloom said to Onyx. “Educate the rest of the class.”
Onyx took a breath and then launched into his dissertation. With gusto. Midnight looked a little sullen at his brother’s stage presence.
“The Chimera Charm is a very old, very powerful magic. In all our years on this earth, I doubt that we Lemniscate have seen it more than…”
He looked over at his siblings and asked, “What, three times?”
“Four,” Eclipse said.
“W-well, five if you count that—“ Fraidy began to say.
“We don’t ever talk about that,” Gloom snapped. My female moggie was referring to that awful event of my childhood. The night I lost both of my parents to a house fire. I had tried to invoke the deluge charm, (an easy charm all things considered) but I couldn’t pull it off. My father had saved my life and had gone back into the blazing building to rescue my mom. They never made it out. Only a few months ago I found out that the fire wasn’t your pedestrian kind of inferno; no sloppy wiring, or careless leaving on of appliances. The fire was balefire. I had no chance of extinguishing it by using a traditional charm designed for putting out traditional fire. I came to live with Grandma Chimera at The Angel, I changed my birth name from Seraphim Joyvive to Hattie Jenkins. I couldn’t face being named after a guardian angel when I couldn’t even protect my own parents. It was from around this time that my interest in the magical arts completely disappeared. I fell, headfirst, into the world of herbs and healing botanicals.
“My point being,” Onyx asserted, giving a stern look at his sister. “It’s very rare. I believe that there are at least one or two Catholic saints who used it in the course of their miracles, just to give you a further idea.”
“Okay, we’ve got it,” Millie said. “But we’re still waiting for you to get around to telling us what it is and what it does, so do you think you can drop the Shakespearean theatrics for a couple of minutes and get to the point?” Millie shook her brightly colored hair indignantly, revealing Fraidy’s face for a brief second.
“Simply put, the charm absolves the recipient from all human guilt, fear, and doubt that dwells in and weighs down its subject. It’s like an absolution, and its effects are so great that it renders its target completely weightless. Weightless as in as light as a feather, and fully open to the light of goodness.” Onyx looked at each of us in turn, to make sure we understood the importance of his words. We were rapt. “Anyone notice the lights of goodness?” My sage cat queried.
The lights! I had wondered what those little golden bubbles were. I thought they were coming from the ride behind the Ferris wheel, but maybe Onyx was right?
“I saw that!” Fraidy squealed. “I saw that shaft of light coming from old-hag Morag!
“I could see that whole light show from Gabby’s stand,” Millie added. “It was all sparkles and stars. Never seen anything like it.”
“Oh, come ON!” Carbon blurted, clearly in Eclipse’s camp as far as his faith in my spell-casting went. “If this theory were tinder, it’d be too wet to hold a spark. Maybe the levitation charm mixed with an illusion spell or a light-bending spell or—“
“You’re wrong, brother,” Onyx said simply.
“Yeah, those lights were the light of goodness, for sure,” Fraidy said confidently from his veil of Millie’s hair. “The lights of personal freedom,” my timid cat concluded.
My exhaustion hit me like a ton of bricks then. “Well, you masters of the mystic arts can fight it out between you. I don’t know what happened, and I’m standing by that,”
I shuffled, already half asleep toward the stairs. “Millie, will you be okay to lock up?” I looked at my cat covered assistant.
“Get some rest, Hattie,” Millie said. “I’ll bring the cats up before I lock up. And, I’ll see you in the morning.”
With that, I ascended the stairs on heavy legs and with a confused head. All thoughts of the Chimera Charm overpowered by thoughts of sleep.
Chapter 4
I awoke to the shrill ring of my turn-of-the-century phone. I opened my eyes a crack and noticed the phone’s receiver vibrating wildly on its cradle. Already one of my kitties was busy giving my head a good kneading. I groaned and turned toward the phone.
“Hey, hold up, boss lady!” Shade said. “You’ve still got some tangles I need to—”
“Later, Shader,” I said, pulling my head off the pillow and away from his grooming paws. Noticing that the sunlight had yet to make an appearance, I picked up the earpiece and said into the receiver, “Hello, really annoying caller.”
“Hat? It’s David,” said the man I love. “Sorry to wake you up this early but we’ve had a break in the case.”
His words chased some of the sleep from my system. “What kind of break?”
“Maude found something. She wants to see us as soon as possible. Think you could meet me at the morgue in a couple of hours?”
I nodded. “Yeah…I’ll have to get Millie up to speed just before we open the shop. What time is it?”
“Fifteen till six.”
“What kind of monster are you?”
“Great, see you there.”
Click.
The morgue was a flat stone slab of a building. It stood out from the rest of its neighbors like a boulder in the middle of Munchkinland. Our good friend, and Gless Inlet’s resident ghoul coroner, Maude Dulgrey, had found something of importance on Morag Devlin’s corpse, it seemed. The building was intimidating in a hair-stand-on-end eerie kinda way. Maude Dulgrey, however, was the most cheerfully buoyant coroner you could meet. She also did a bang-up job of her work. Maude’s findings throughout all of our murder cases had certainly led to subsequent arrests. In short, we’d be nowhere without her astute autopsy skills.
David was waiting by the door when I arrived. Judging by the circles under his eyes, he’d slept about as well as I had. I know murder cases were stressful, but something else was eating at my friend. I’d never seen him like this before. I don’t know, but, the last month or so, the chief certainly seemed as if he’d lost his usually wry sense of humor.
“Hey,” he said with a wan smile. “Wasn’t sure you’d get here before I was invited in.”
“Had to spend a few minutes explaining to the cats why they couldn’t come,” I said, stifling a yawn. “How long have you been waiting?”
“Yikes, I bet you left an angry Carbon behind,” he offered apologetically and glanced at his watch. “For Goddess’ sakes, another one?” He shook his wrist vigorously and proceeded to tap the face of his watch with impatient fingers. David exhaled. “Not long, about five minutes, I guess?”
�
�How many watches have you gone through these last couple of months?” I quizzed my friend. Maybe it had been his proximity to the balefire beacon that he had had to snuff out during the Aurel Nugget investigation. Was it possible that being so close to that infernal beacon had somehow upset the electromagnetic fields around him? I would have to question Maude about this sometime. Not while the Chief was present though.
“Too many,” David confessed. “But, we’re not here to discuss timekeeping, so let’s see what Maude’s got to say, shall we?” CPI Trew turned to the door and hammered the large, monster-fist knocker.
“Do you have any idea what she’s found?”
“Not a clue. But I know she received a whole bunch of brand new state-of-the-art tech from Talisman. So, I’m hoping her new gadgets have turned up something useful. Before you ask, she doesn’t know who signed the authority for the delivery. But, I have a feeling it might have something to do with the Custodian’s.”
I smiled brightly at my friend. “And, by Custodians, that must surely mean Portia Fearwyn.” I answered with a smug glow traveling through my body. David just rolled his eyes.
The wooden door opened at that moment. To our surprise, Hector Muerte stood on the threshold. Strange. Maude was usually the one to greet us when we popped in for a visit. Not that Hector wasn’t a gracious host or anything.
“Everything alright with Maude, Hector?” David asked, his words mirroring my creeping alarm.
The zombie assistant coroner gave an affirmative grunt and nodded, his milky eyes rolling in their sockets as his head bobbed up and down. Hector stepped aside and waved us in.
Day or night, the inside of the hallway always looked the same. A row of blazing torches lined the corridor, spaced between featureless wooden doors on either side. The walls and floor were composed of the same rock as the outer walls.
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